MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

328 Freud, Sigmund
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Freud, Sigmund
A prolific and gifted writer, whose broad learning extended
from neurophysiology and EVOLUTION to the literature of
six languages, Sigmund Freud (1826–1939) was one of the
most influential scientists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. He was also one of the most controversial
scientists of any time, so much so that both his critics
and admirers have occasionally succumbed to the temptation
to deny that he was a scientist at all.
Freud’s positive and negative reputations flow from the
same source—the extraordinary scope of his theories.
Although the notions of unconscious ideas and processes
did not originate with Freud, having philosophical antecedents
in Gottfried Leibniz’s (1646–1716) theory of
petites perceptions and psychiatric antecedents in the work
of, inter alia, Pierre Janet (1859–1947), Freud made them
the centerpiece of his complex theory of the mind. Unlike
other psychiatrists, Freud took unconscious ideas and processes
to be critical in explaining the behavior of all people
in all circumstances and not merely the outré actions of
psychotics. Unlike Leibniz and his followers, Freud presented
unconscious ideas not merely as a theoretical
necessity, but as the key to human action. Through his
spirited defense of the necessity and importance of unconscious
ideas and processes, he gave these concepts theoretical
respectability, almost in spite of their associations
with him.
The explanatory scope of unconscious ideas and processes
was enormous for Freud, because he saw psychoanalysis
(see PSYCHOANALYSIS, CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF
and PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY OF) as bridging the gap
between the biological and the “human” sciences. Freud’s
early training in neurophysiology led him to try to ground
psychological theorizing in the known structures of the
brain. His incomplete manuscript, “Project for a Scientific
Psychology” attempted to relate specific psychological
functions, such as learning and memory, to recently discovered
properties of the neurons. In this respect, his
methodological principles exactly paralleled the current
view in cognitive science that psychological theorizing
must be consistent with and informed by the most recent
knowledge in neuroscience. Freud was also an avid supporter
of DARWIN and was explicit in stating that his theory
of sexual and self-preservative instincts was firmly rooted
in (evolutionary) biology. Prototypical of his synthetic
approach to knowledge, he made a bold conjecture about
an important relation between the findings of neurophysiology
and evolutionary biology. If, as nearly all psychologists
agreed, the mind functioned as a reflex, then it
required constant stimulation, and if, as Darwin argued,
the sexual instinct is one of the two most important forces
governing animal life, then these findings could be
brought together under a more comprehensive theory that
sexual instincts (libido) drove the nervous system.
Although Freud, his disciples, and his critics often present
libido theory as an extrapolation from the sexual difficulties
of his patients, its real strength and appeal came from
its plausible biological premises.
Thanks to Darwin’s influence, sexuality also played an
important role in the social sciences of the late nineteenth
century. A methodological imperative of evolutionary
anthropology and sociology was to connect sophisticated
human achievements to “primitive” conditions shared with
animals, and sexual behavior was the most obvious point
of connection. Given these trends in social science, Freud
was able to make “upward” connections between psychoanalysis
and the social sciences, as well as “downward”
connections to neurophysiology and biology. In his efforts
to find links among all the “mental” sciences, Freud’s
methodological approach again bears a striking resemblance
to the interdisciplinary emphasis of current cognitive
science. This approach was also the basis of the
tremendous appeal of psychoanalysis: he believed that he
had a theory that could provide biologically grounded
explanations, in terms of sexual and self-preservative
instincts and the various mental processes that operated on
them, for everything from psychotic symptoms, dreams,
and jokes to cultural practices such as art and religion.
Freud’s theories of CONSCIOUSNESS and the EMOTIONS
were also the product of an interdisciplinary synthesis
between psychiatry and philosophy. Individuals whose
behavior was driven by natural, but unconscious, emotional
forces needed treatment in order to gain control of
their lives by bringing the forces that govern them to consciousness.
This was possible, Freud believed, because
affective states were also cognitive and so could be made
conscious through their ideational components. Although
the Project offered some speculations about the qualitative
character of consciousness, Freud’s later approach
was functionalist. Conscious ideas differed from the
unconscious, because they could be expressed verbally,